Who likes the sound of them? I'm partial to the tone of pedal steels - almost a weeping sound
They were first brought into public recognition in 19th century Hawaii using standard acoustic guitars before their first step in evolution by the Weissenborn company
On the US mainland a Hawaiian music craze hit in the 1920s-30s and Dobros laid a foundation for the amplified lap steel, which companies like Rickenbacker marketed as the earliest widely available electric guitars, which Leo Fender did not actually invent, but rather improved in the course of refining the electric lap steel design - his Esquire model standard guitar was a result of his Aspie-ish indecision as to whether a "Spanish" guitar should be optimized to be a solo-lead or a background instrument.
In the late 1940s Fender began adding legs to his lap steels and increasing the number of necks to further tuning possibilities, these are considered to be console steels. Companies like Bigsby and Gibson began adding mechanisms to allow the players to bend individual strings.
A typical pedal steel has 2 necks of 10 strings in C6 (near neck) and E9 (far neck) tunings, 10 mechanical pedals, a volume pedal and 4 or more knee levers.
The 'steel' in steel guitar is not from what they are made out of but rather the steel slide held in the player's left hand
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Let's go on out and take a moped ride, and all your friends will thing your brain is fried, but you can't live your life too dirty, 'cause in the the end you're born to go 30